More Champagne, Jean-Claude?
You’ll doubtless be relieved to know it’s no longer illegal for French people to eat lunch at their desks. In that country the works councils - comités d'entreprise - have enormous power vis-a-vis management. A corporation, for instance, can’t move a worker’s office across the street without the express permission from the union. Want to restructure your business model, introduce a new product or make a change to senior management? Without the works councils OK, forget about it. I have experience in France working on such issues and it wasn’t pretty, but what the staff and CEO of a big French bank did was mind-blowing.